The strange thing about our new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s professed wish to return to the 1970s, to a prelapsarian age before Margaret Thatcher, is that this kind of wistful, hopeless desire to turn the clock back has always been an accusation levelled at Reform UK and its supporters. How many times over the years have we heard voices on the left sneer at Nigel Farage and his acolytes, deride his and their delusional, insular, xenophobic, borderline racist yearning for ‘the Britain of the 1950s’? Yet few liberal-left figures today seem concerned that the new leader of the Labour party and this country unashamedly pines for The Good Old Days.

Many on the left long for an idyllic Britain that didn’t exist, a time many of them don’t remember, while those on the populist right recall a better time that did actually exist and one they did actually live through

Many on the left long for an idyllic Britain that didn’t exist, a time many of them don’t remember, while those on the populist right recall a better time that did actually exist and one they did actually live through

If they did notice this dissonance they might discover something even more disruptive to the cosy liberal-left narrative. This is the reality that many on the left long for an idyllic Britain that........

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